Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
Writing sales copy is one of the few skills that is vital to almost every business. If you’re marketing online selling information products; copywriting is an essential skill. The good news is, very few people are good at copywriting. Even ‘professional’ copywriters make endless mistakes. So I decided to compile a list of the 5 most common sales copy mistakes:
In this guide
1. A Clever Headline
The headline is by far the most important element of a good sales page. It’s what visitors first see, and what makes them decide whether they’ll read the rest of the sales page or not. A compelling headline should do three things:
- Build Curiosity
- Excite
- Grab Attention
One mistake copywriters make is making their headlines ‘too clever’ for the reader. Headlines should be simple. They either work or they don’t. If your headline works, visitors will go past it and start reading the first paragraph. If the first paragraph is successful, they will read the second. If you have a poor headline or it’s too clever; people may well read the first paragraph – but soon close the page.
Your headline shouldn’t be clever, it should be clear and simple. It should explain exactly what problem your product is going to solve for the reader as well as build some curiosity.
2. Revolving Your Sales Page Around Your Product
Sales pages are designed to sell products, yes; but people don’t buy products. They buy solutions to their problems or desires. Listing endless features of your product is a mistake that will kill your conversions.
You need to sell readers on the benefits of your product, not the actual features or product itself. Focus on the reader’s emotions and feelings, exactly why they need to buy your product (their desired outcome); the product details should only be at the bottom of the page before the call to action.
3. A Crappy Call To Action
No matter how compelling your copy is, you won’t sell anything with a bad call to action. The call to action is the last part of your copy where you tell the reader to pull out their credit card and buy the product.
People writing their own copy are often afraid of asking readers to spend money (as ridiculous as that sounds). Your call to action needs to be strong, and direct. You need to lay out and explain exactly why the reader needs and wants to buy your product.
Precisely why it would be stupid for them not to buy, then re-state what they’ll get. Lastly your call to action should tell the reader directly to ‘buy now’.
4. Not Enough Urgency
Urgency is one of the few major elements of high converting sales copy. If you want people to make a decision, what do you do? You tell them to hurry the hell up and make their decision. Simple right? That’s how we all apply urgency in our daily lives. Telling people straight up to make a decision.
It works the same way in copywriting. If you don’t tell readers to make a decision, right now; they will go home, procrastinate, procrastinate some more until they convince themselves not to buy your product. You want at least 90% of sales to come from first time visitors, not people who’ve read your sales page; thought about it and come back to buy.
The vast majority of people who go away to ‘think about it’ will never buy your product. You need to add a sense of urgency to your sales page.
- Say The Offer Will Be Taken Down
- Say The Price Will Go Up
- Say There Are Limited Copies
Those are the 3 quickest ways to add urgency to your sales page and drive more sales.
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5. Not Using Social Proof
Online, social proof is absolutely everything. When you go to the mall to buy a pair of sunglasses, you don’t see a list of testimonials saying how awesome the glasses are. Social proof isn’t very applicable to offline marketing. But online, it means everything. If your sales copy sucks so bad, that your 8 year old daughter wrote it; you could still sell a lot of copies by using real social proof.
Social proof is the most powerful online selling tool. All a reader wants to know is if the product will work for them, if it will get them the results they so desperately desire. Right? If they see dozens or hundreds of other people with real face giving positive testimonials; they will buy.
They will compare themselves to the people the product worked for and if there’s a testimonial from someone even remotely like them; it will likely push them over the edge to make a decision and buy now.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Derby, February 13 2013, 20:11
I have been reading a lot of blogs and forums recently. Some are really informative some are entertaining and some are a real crack up. I’ve got to admit it, great job on this blog, I’ll be sure to check back from time to time.
Tyronne Ratcliff, February 13 2013, 21:35
Great post Dave, creating urgency is important because like you said you don’t want people going home to think about it, once they have 1 reason not to buy your product they’ll usually come up with a dozen other ones as well, thanks for the helpful tips!
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Sorry if this is obvious to everyone else, but the urgency section troubles me a little — saying the offer is about to be taken down or the price is about to rise, when neither of those things is actually true, feels like exactly the kind of thing that makes people not trust sales pages in the first place. Is that just how it’s done, or is there an honest version of urgency?
Bonnie, you’re not wrong to be uneasy about it. I spent six years building a team in Dubai and watched plenty of that manufactured urgency up close, both used well and used badly, before I walked away from the industry entirely in 2022. The honest version does exist: real cohort limits, a genuine price increase already scheduled and announced elsewhere, a launch window that actually closes on a specific date because of something operational, not invented. The dishonest version is inventing a deadline that quietly resets every time someone revisits the page a week later. Readers can’t always tell the difference from outside looking in, which is exactly why the people doing it honestly keep getting lumped in with the ones who aren’t.
Playing devil’s advocate for the urgency section, because I think it deserves a fairer hearing than it’s getting here: the strongest case for artificial urgency isn’t that it’s honest, it’s that human decision-making genuinely requires a forcing function, and ‘think about it’ is where most sales actually go to die, urgency or not. The best version of this argument holds that a deadline, even a soft one, serves the buyer as much as the seller, by ending a deliberation that was never going to resolve itself. I’m not sure I believe it fully, but it’s stronger than the flat ‘urgency equals manipulation’ read.
We called that ‘the close’ back in the eighties. Different software, same countdown timer, same forcing function. Nothing about it is new.
The claim that you want at least 90% of sales from first-time visitors is stated as settled fact with no source or sample behind it. That number depends entirely on the price point, the complexity of the decision, and the length of the sales cycle. A ten-dollar impulse buy and a program that costs someone real money are not going to convert on the same visit, and treating them as one curve is where this kind of advice goes wrong.
To pull Raj’s point into something usable: the post’s five mistakes reduce to two categories. Structural, headline, page order, call to action, urgency, which you can test and fix without touching the product. And evidential, social proof and the 90% claim, which depends entirely on what you’re selling and to whom. The gap I’d flag is that the post treats both categories with the same confidence, when only the first one is close to universal. The second needs the kind of data Raj is asking for before anyone should treat it as a rule rather than a guess.
I am wondering how the social proof point translates outside the US market. In Turkey, testimonials from strangers online carry much less weight than a recommendation from someone in your own network, even a distant one. A wall of unfamiliar faces on a page can look more suspicious than convincing here, where trust travels through relationships first. I would be curious whether this changes the advice for anyone selling outside a Western audience.
Elif’s point reminds me of something from the diner. Regulars never once asked me for a testimonial before ordering the meatloaf, they asked their neighbor who’d already eaten it. A framed newspaper clipping on the wall did less work than one person at the next table saying it was good. I think that’s closer to what you’re describing than anything a sales page can fake. Trust that travels person to person doesn’t need dozens of strangers vouching, it needs the one person already sitting at your table.